


True Gold

by AetherAria



Series: Fate Picks Its Favorites [1]
Category: Megamind (2010)
Genre: Adoption, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Babies, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Lady Scott gets a second Xmas present...
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-20
Updated: 2018-08-02
Packaged: 2018-09-25 18:58:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9839519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AetherAria/pseuds/AetherAria
Summary: What exactly would have happened if Wayne's pod hadn't knocked Megamind's off course and, instead, they had both crash-landed in the Scott's parlor on Christmas morning? [Retroactively re-named because the original title fit better as the title of the entire series, and this particular part will only deal with the early days. Now named for a lyric in The Mountain Goats song, Pink and Blue.]





	1. Gifts and Family

**Author's Note:**

> This is.... well, I meant it as a one shot but it feels more like an introduction to a goddamn 'verse so I suppose we'll see if I get properly inspired to write (/finish/) any sequels to this. I have... a LOT of ideas. My Lady Scott is partially influenced by setepenre-set's version of her. Set you are brilliant and inspiring!!

An easy enough adjustment: instead of a pinball bounce, the pods adhere together. An errant scrap of metal catches another, perhaps, or a magnetic component gone awry. Or, maybe, they simply behave as they were originally intended. Two pods come rocketing off from a doomed system, orphans of the same sun both meant for the same new planet; it’s difficult to believe that their families did not intend them to remain together.

It’s a little more obvious that the two infants aren’t gifts when one of the pods is made of what looks like scrap metal, sporadically sparking, but Lady Diana Scott is quite practiced at deciding what things are and aren’t noticed in her household. The smiling boy with the sparkling gold onesie is making grabby hands at her from his gleaming little ship (it matches the cream-and-gold theme of her parlor almost too well) and the other-

Eyes wide and wary and so, so green. So green that she almost doesn’t notice how blue the rest of him is, for a moment.

“Babies,” she says, her shock making the word escape her without the usual triple check past her brain.

“Mmhmm, yes, I saw it and thought of you,” her husband says, quite inanely, still too engrossed in his newspaper to pay her or the new hole in their roof any attention. If she was a different sort of person, she would feel bitter about that, perhaps. As things are, though, this will likely work to her advantage.

The more- human looking of the two infants is frowning up at her now, apparently perturbed that she hasn’t obeyed his wordless instruction of up now, and then he lifts into the air, apparently of his own power. Her eyes widen in alarm as he lifts higher, laughing brightly and pushing himself off the chandelier.

“The- baby can fly,” she states, as if saying it out loud will force it to make sense. Her husband drawls something else dismissive from behind his newsprint shield, but she ignores him.

She glances back down at the blue baby, half expecting some similar feat, but he just stares back. His eyes are bright and scared, he’s sucking on what looks like an electronic binky, and he’s clinging his chubby arms around a ball that appears to contain only water and scales and teeth.

She’s hesitating and she knows it. Pursing her lips, she crouches down to get a better look at the baby, who continues to eye her with that unnervingly bright attention, and then she carefully scoops the child into her arms where he fits with only a minor adjustment needed to accommodate his head. The baby looks up at her for a long moment, the ball still clutched in his arms, and then he gets caught up in a yawn and his wariness relaxes in the steady warmth Lady Scott is providing. The ball, the fish thing in the ball, it stares up at her with an expression approaching a pout. Lady Scott has never known fish to be capable of pouting; she has also never known infants to fly or have periwinkle skin, though, so she decides not to let it bother her. She and the fish both look at the blue baby again and watch his eyes blink closed, dropped instantly into easy sleep. When the fish looks back up to her, it looks somewhat less unhappy.

Giving a satisfied little nod, she tucks the child more securely against her and turns her attention to the other infant, who is bouncing along the ceiling like a parade balloon in a windstorm. She put her free hand on her hip and looks at the child thoughtfully. He seems to sense the attention and stops grabbing at her Christmas tree to beam down at her, big blue eyes expressive in their delight. He makes those grabby hands again, floating upside-down and somehow managing not to disturb his hair in the process, and then he hurtles with alarming suddenness towards her.

She reacts quickly enough to angle her body so that the second baby collides with her free side instead of the one already sleeping in her arms, but it’s a near thing. She only barely manages to suppress a shout when the impact happens, rocking her backwards on her heels. That was- too fast. Too hard a point of contact. Nothing sleeveless for a week or so (she knows from experience, she recognizes the feeling and knows what the result will be) because the infant now squirming in her arms just caused what will become a bruise the size of a grapefruit just above her collarbone.

The blue baby slept through it, she realizes when she glances down to check, but the fish is looking upset again. Angry, maybe. She wraps her hand around the second baby and pulls him more securely against herself, then bounces in place with a shushing noise. Hopefully that will placate both the baby and the fish thing. The infant gurgles slightly and grips her shirt in his tiny hand, his fingers pulling the fabric taut. The fish’s frown deepens and it turns away from her in a huff. Diana frowns as well.

She thinks quickly for a moment or two, and then says in a very casually pitched voice, “Dear, would you ring the bell for me?”

Without looking up, her husband does as asked. She allows herself a moment to wonder exactly when he’ll realize what’s happened, but she can’t dwell on it because her household manager Sabitri is already striding in, her sharp dark eyes taking in the scene with some degree of alarm.

Lady Scott gives her best smile of understated pleasure to put the girl at ease, then immediately launches into a series of instructions, given in her typical, casual, no-argument-will-be-brooked tone. She needs diapers. Formula. A pair of cribs, a changing station, a stroller, car seats, a baby monitor, and a lot of baby clothes. Diana’s PA can make that run, certainly. It’s Christmas, but that shouldn’t be any obstacle.

“I need you to find a pediatrician willing to make a house call as soon as possible,” she says. “Discreetly.” Sabitri is taking notes in her speedy shorthand, the clever thing. “But before that, before anything else,” she lets her seriousness bleed into her tone, just for a moment, “I want my lawyer here within the hour. I won’t speak to anyone else until I speak to him.”

At Diana’s dismissive gesture Sabitri is instantly gone. Good. Diana is not willing to tolerate anything less, not today. She gives her paper-obscured husband one last look and then leaves him to go to her study. She wants to be ready when her lawyer arrives.

Lady Diana Scott is very acutely aware, sitting at her desk and waiting with an inhuman infant breathing softly in each of her arms, of the benefits of her wealth. She will use every single cent she has, if she must, to shield them.


	2. Namesakes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Naming alien children is a pain in the ass.

The trouble is, the babies need names before any adoption can be finalized, and Lady Scott hasn’t exactly been considering children lately. She hasn’t had any reason to, and she certainly hasn’t been wasting time considering what names potential children might have. The unnamed babies in question are both sleeping, each carefully settled into their brand new cribs as Lady Scott’s lawyer weaves a legal safety net around all of them using words like _asylum_ and _protective custody_ and _the right to nationality of foundlings_. Sabitri had the insight to purchase a book of baby names with the rest of the supplies, but right now it’s only dangling from Diana’s hand as she paces back and forth between the cribs.  
  
She’s stalking. It’s something her mother used to do in moments of anxiety, and apparently Diana picked it up along the way. That thought makes her serene expression twitch, which irritates her enough that she gives up the pretense of even trying to read the baby name book, and she sets it down on her desk. Forcing her feet to stop at the feet of one of the cribs, she leans over the rail, staring down at the baby in contemplation.

The blue baby is sucking on his neon-glow pacifier even in his sleep, and his arms are clutched around the also-sleeping fish. Gears in her head turn.

This child was sent here with comfort objects. Maybe-

She needs to see the pods again.

They’re tucked away in an unused room next to the study, because Diana wants them nearby and because she knows it’s a room that her husband won’t enter unprompted. The slipshod pod is chock full of exposed wiring and greasy metal that she really isn’t sure if she should touch (someone put a _baby_ in there?), but she reaches an arm in anyway, her sleeve carefully folded up. She doesn’t see anything else recognizable; no baby blankets, no convenient name-tag, no teddy bear, but when she retrieves her hand, her fingers brush against something that is unmistakably a button.

It’s under the lip, inside where the front hatch of the pod opened up. It’s not visible from outside, but what use would an infant have for a button, anyway? Is it some sort of low grade toy, just meant to engage motor function, or-

The moment her fingers brush against it, there’s a noise and a light, both unfamiliar. She crouches closer, because the voices - and they are unmistakably voices, now - are coming from inside the pod, and her angle is wrong to see the source. For a moment she thinks it’s a video, but the image soon resolves a bit closer than that.

It’s a hologram, like Diana has only ever seen in movies. Two tiny projected figures, each holding the other with their faces aimed away from Diana and towards the back of the pod- where the baby would have been. Their heads are too big, and their skin looks tinged blue in a way that she would have assumed was just a problem with the tint of the image if she hadn’t held a blue baby in her own arms less than an hour before. They are saying something, and though Diana can’t understand any of the words, the tone is very clear.

They are desperate, and they are loving, and they are saying goodbye.

It’s a very short message. The moment before it ends, the figures embrace tightly, and then they jerk apart as the hologram replays.

Their language is incredibly foreign, full of sibilant noises and trills that Diana is unsure if she could replicate. It sounds, in fact, quite alien.

Which really shouldn’t be a surprise, she thinks as the message statics out and replays a third time. She had known pretty instantly that the infants are both non-human, but she hadn’t expanded that thought to its logical next step, to the worry of what they are, if not human. The boxes that are ticked in her head now, though, include: advanced technology, unfamiliar anatomy, unfamiliar skin tones, incredible strength, literal flight, seemingly intelligent aquatic life, and all of the above _dropping from the sky_. The idea that they are aliens is certainly pulling ahead in the pool of likely origins for the children.

On the fourth repetition, she thinks she’s managed to pick out a specific word, or something like it. They (the parents? The alien parents?) say it near the beginning, and drop it a few more times in the middle, and near the end they repeat it over and over, drawing out long hisses between each instance.

She narrows her eyes. As strange and inhuman as the words are, there is something familiar here. Something about the way they say it, the obvious affection in their eyes, in the way they occasionally gasp, stop, compose themselves before continuing on. Something about the way that one particular word is said, so carefully, so warmly.

They certainly _say it_ like a name.

If she’s wrong, though, and she tries to canonize it as the child’s name, it could be highly traumatizing down the line, couldn’t it? She listens again, and again, sat on the floor inelegantly, like a child. She has to be sure.

By the time she _is_ sure, she’s also sure that she could recite the entire short speech phonetically, from memory, though she obviously hasn’t garnered any deeper understanding. She’s no linguist, and she has no convenient stone from which to base her translations. But she is sure of the most important part. She tests the word aloud, very quietly. She barely has to move her lips. She’s lucky that it’s one of the sounds that she can reproduce with her human vocal cords, and she feels-

Diana stands, carefully smoothing down her skirt, and the hologram shuts off on its own. Her mouth quirks into something like a smile. Clever device, she thinks, and then she turns her attention to the other pod.

On the surface, it’s far more impressive; gilded and gleaming and slick. When she runs her hands over the surface, they slide like she’s touching solid silk, and the inside is cushioned and gives enough to leave impressions of her fingertips for seconds after she pulls them away. No matter how carefully she looks, though, she can’t find a button like the one in the blue baby’s pod. She can’t find much of anything, actually, besides padding and extraneous shine. Sent in style, this one, but not much in the way of practical applications.

Well. She supposes it would be too much to ask to have that kind of luck twice in a row.

Sabitri is unpacking baby supplies in the corner when Diana comes back into the study, and her lawyer hasn’t moved from where she left him. He’s so engrossed in the heavy book in front of him that he doesn’t even blink at her reentry, and Sabitri knows her well enough that she simply continues with her work as well. Diana allows herself a brief twinge of pride in her people before she strides back over to the crib.

He’s still sleeping, but the fish is awake again, blinking up at her in drowsy confusion. Her lip pulls to the side, her nerves jumping in her stomach for only a moment before she murmurs the name aloud.

“Syx.” She’s already decided on the spelling she intends to use. She knows she’ll have to differentiate it from the number- she pronounces it differently, swallowing the vowel like the aliens had. Her eyes flick to the fish, whose fins had flared at the word. It’s looking up at her in obvious shock, and then with a look that makes Diana think that she has impressed the creature. She raises an eyebrow, gestures to the child very slightly (not enough for the two other humans in the room to notice), and repeats, questioningly, “Syx?”

The fish blinks, mouth slack for a moment before it flutters up and twirls in a quick circle, teeth exposed in something that could have been a grin on a mammal. On the fish, it looks somehow both pleased _and_ intimidating. Or, it would have been intimidating if the thing wasn’t trapped in a tiny ball.

She takes the pseudo-smile as a confirmation, or as close to one as she can expect to get. She says the name a third time. Louder, now.

Her lawyer finally glances up from his paperwork. “You’ve made a decision?”

“One of two,” she says, folding her arms over her chest. She turns to the second boy, brow furrowing in concentration as gears turn in her mind.

This baby- he already has a bright, charming smile, and lovely hair, and he has cool blue eyes like her father did. Diana is momentarily grateful that she can’t see them while he’s sleeping. Then, of course, there are her emerging bruises to consider as well.

It wouldn’t be fair, would it? Just because the child has- features that remind her- it wouldn’t be fair to chain him with her father’s name as some sort of bizarre, too-late revenge. She can’t chain him with that sort of baggage. It wouldn’t be fair to either of them, and it certainly wouldn’t be a good first step towards teaching the boy to mind his own strength.

She purses her lips. Fathers, though. That’s a thought. Her own might be scorched earth but her husband-

The late Lord Scott had been one of the primary reasons she decided to marry Victor in the first place, over her other potential matches. He had been clever and observant and kind and he had known from the moment they met that what Diana needed most was a mentor. So, he slowly earned her trust and then taught her how to be clever like him, and observant like him, and she skimmed through the lessons on kindness as well, just to round out her edges. He taught her how to hone her hypervigilance into something useful and precise, and combined with her knack for being overlooked, she had become rather dangerous in certain circles. So much so that, when her father-in-law died, he explicitly left his company in her hands. Oh, Victor was to ‘run things’ as expected, of course, but beneath the lawyerspeak and cigars and back-patting, Diana and the late Lord Scott understood each other. Diana was, they both knew, impeccably good at pulling strings.

There’s a bust of her late father-in-law on the bookshelf behind her; she doesn’t turn to look at it.

Diana isn’t the type of person to prioritize kindness above self preservation, but… well, the two don’t always have to be mutually exclusive.

“Wayne,” she says, quite softly. “Wayne Scott.” She knows that just giving him the name of a good man won’t be enough on its own, but maybe it will help in some small way. His namesake was the only person she has ever known who never used his position, his _power_ , to hurt others. She doesn’t want to turn this boy into his grandfather, but she can try to pass on some of what he taught her anyway.

She suspects that down the line there will be some consequences to giving her human-passing son a human-sounding name and her visibly inhuman son a name that slips off the tongue like an asp, but- well, her hands are tied. She can’t in good conscience know what Syx’s parents called him and then call him something else, call him Steven or Richard or god forbid Victor Junior, and she has nothing else to go on for Wayne. No clues, no context. She’s just going to have to explain it to them when they’re old enough to understand, and hope that it’s enough.

The ink on the official adoption paperwork is dry within the hour.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Headcanons about Megamind's species' language are lovingly borrowed from setepenre-set, with permission, and it's likely that I'll be drawing from their M'ega culture and language for this fic in the future, because it's AWESOME. If you haven't already read their work, you're missing out and should remedy that as soon as humanly possible!


	3. Undercurrents

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Diana begins to deal with some of the consequences of the third new addition to her family.

For the first day or so, Diana doesn’t have much time or energy to worry about the fish.

Once she’s gone through every available legal avenue with her lawyer to make sure no on can take her children away from her without breaking at least three laws, though, and once they’ve been properly checked out by a well-paid, discreet, thorough pediatrician, and once she’s deftly and cheerfully shamed her husband out of ever asking her exactly how he’s missed adopting two non-human children while simultaneously guilting him into dealing with the roof repairs, she looks at the water-filled orb and begins to worry about this as well.

She’s aware enough of the legal system to know that the absolute worst thing she could do is not acknowledge the fish. Leaving it in some nebulous, unmentioned position would leave her with no options if anyone ever comes knocking, looking to probe for weak points in her newly-cemented family. So, the fish is claimed as the legal property of Syx himself, along with the pod, the pacifier, and the little onesie that he arrived in (Wayne’s list is slightly smaller), and as such all of it is protected from outside hands.

Property.

That word is itching away at the back of her mind like a burr. She was sure the moment she said Syx’s name and the fish _smiled_ that whatever this creature is, it’s smarter than the average goldfish by a hundred miles, and owning a dog is one thing, but she’s already dealing with too many unknowns in this situation for her to feel comfortable labeling ownership of a creature she doesn’t know the intelligence of.

When she sets Syx down in the newly acquired crib and nestles the orb on the couch nearby, the fish starts to _roll_ , bouncing down to the floor without apparent harm. When she gives the thing an unamused look (she is amused, and a bit concerned, but the habit is too ingrained for it to surface on her face even though the fish is the only other waking creature in the room), it runs itself against her ankles and frowns right back at her until she picks it up again.

It’s glaring at her. Her mouth pulls to the side, and when she starts to speak she keeps her tone low enough that no one outside the room will hear her. “What on Earth are- no, fine, you’re probably from another planet, so- what in the name of grace are you looking at me like that for?”

The fish has a ridge over its eyes that echoes an eyebrow, and it furrows that pseudo-brow as if in confusion.

“Of course,” she mutters. “Even if you understand the word ‘Syx’ you wouldn’t understand English.” As if to emphasize her point, the fish startles at Syx’s name. Diana narrows her eyes. “You need a bigger tank.”

She’s pretty sure of that, as well. The fish takes up somewhere near one-third of the available space in its little ball, and even with her cursory knowledge of fish, she knows that isn’t sustainable. Is this thing freshwater, or salt? Can this ball even open to check?

She and Victor have a koi pond on the property; the woman who supplies their fish might have some sort of insight, so she has Sabitri make a call or two and arranges a meeting for the next day, which gives her enough time to have her lawyer fax over an appropriate nondisclosure agreement for the occasion.

Ms Irving looks more amused than concerned when she’s instructed to sign on the dotted line the next day. She does so with a flourish and a raised eyebrow, and when she hands the pen back she smirks and says, “A bit more pomp and circumstance than usual, Lady Scott?”

“The situation requires it,” Diana says, and turns to lead Ms Irving towards the study she’s selected for this meeting. The children are two rooms over, Sabitri watching carefully as they nap. The fish and its ball is sitting on the desk, fenced in with a square of books that are too thick for the creature to roll the ball over. That arrangement took a bit of experimentation, and now the fish is glaring as it bounces obstinately against the shortest of the books. Her lip twitches at the sight as the fish turns its glare up to her, but she doesn’t let her expression change.

“What in the… what the hell is…”

“That’s what I wanted you to tell me,” Diana says, folding her arms across her chest. “What is it? What does it need? Is it fresh or salt water? I don’t know how to get into that ball to even feed it, and it’s been long enough since the creature came into my possession that I’ve begun to worry about that point in particular.”

“There’s not nearly enough room in that ball for that thing,” Irving says as she leans down, quiet fury bleeding into her tone. “And what the hell is that on its head? Did someone plug a fuse into the poor guy?”

The fish looks anxious at the close attention, and its fins flare out like it’s trying to intimidate by faking being larger than it is. It bares its teeth and Lady Scott moves behind the desk and lifts her hand out, steadying the ball. The fish startles and glances back at her, and Diana keeps her expression calm. “I don’t know. It was like that when it came into my possession. Should I assume that you haven’t seen anything like this before?”

“You assume damn right,” Irving says, her eyes still equally confused and concerned. “He looks-” she pauses to purse her lips, “purely on the surface, he looks like some deep sea fish I know of, but the shape is- his eyes are very-”

“Alert?” Diana supplies, and Irving snaps her fingers.

“Exactly. You ever seen a fish watch you like that?”

“I can’t say that I have.”

“Where did this thing come fro-”

“I can’t answer that either.” She allows herself a wry smile. “I can’t give you information I don’t have, Ms Irving.”  
The fish has been glancing back and forth between them in turn as they speak, and now it nudges the ball against Diana’s hand. She lifts her palm and the fish rolls again, bouncing against the book-barrier once and then turning back around to glare at Diana.

“He’s… he moves on his own?”

“Yes. It seems rather in control of where it goes. I would be worried if the ball didn’t seem to be quite resistant to breakage.”

“You tried to break it?”

Diana scoffs at Irving’s look of irritation. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s rolled itself off of every surface it could get to by now, nothing to do with my wishes. Luckily it seems predisposed to bounce.”

“Bounce?” Diana nods, and Ms Irving reaches a hand down towards the ball. The fish reverses course away from the intrusive hand so quickly that it collides with the books behind it, then ricochets forward again. Ms Irving’s hand retreats before the fish makes contact, and to Diana’s private amusement she chimes out a quick, “Sorry, sorry little guy.” Now she holds her hands out in a placating gesture, and when the fish looks at her in alarm she lifts one of her hands out like someone would do if they were trying to coax in a skittish cat.

Ms Irving looks like- not quite like she’s seen a ghost exactly, but more like she’s discovered some sort of pirate treasure, unexpected and glorious and, of course, potentially lucrative.

Diana thinks: that is a perfectly natural reaction to something like this.

Diana thinks: I was smart to have her sign a more restrictive version of the NDA.

Irving is crooking her finger and the fish is watching warily, and then it rolls a few inches closer. She slowly closes her fingers around the little globe and lifts it to her face, turning it to try to get a closer look, though the fish keeps turning with it to keep them eye to eye.

Diana wants to ask approximately eight different questions; instead, she watches. Irving turns the ball in her hands, watching as the fish keeps steady in the center, unmoved as she examines the globe, fingers carefully probing, likely looking for a catch or a seam. Diana knows that she probably won’t find one, since Diana tried the same thing. Next, Irving covers the top of the orb carefully with her wide palm, and when the shade falls over it the ridges and bulbs on the fish shine with a dim, blue-green luminescence. Diana’s surprised that Irving caught on to that part so quickly; Diana hadn’t noticed that until she turned the lights in her bedroom the night before and the little orb had started glowing in Syx’s crib. Irving nods, apparently unsurprised by this reaction, and then takes a finger and moves it back and forth in front of the creature. It watches for one or two passes, and then its face shifts into an expression that Diana would swear is a frown, and then it looks at Diana instead. Diana feels, on some nonsense level, like she’s being asked a question, and she easily suppresses an urge to shrug at the fish in response. Obviously, that would be a ridiculous thing to do.

Irving glances back to her as well, so she raises an eyebrow. “Well?” Diana holds her hands out and Irving passes the orb back to her. Diana notes that she only hesitated for half a second. “Any insight?”

“He’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before, I can tell you that much for free.” She purses her lips and tilts her head. “His structure is so _weird_ , it’s like he’s got- I don’t know. That little antennae thing is still worrying me, but it looks like it was intentional somehow, it’s not infected, and honestly it looks like its at least a month or two old if I had to guess. It’s healed up nicely, which tells me this thing came from a healthy, clean environment, or had some sort of direct medical intervention that lasted post-installation. Also weird.”

“What about the ball?”

“The ball?” Irving laughs. “I don’t have any clue. I can’t figure out how to get in, so I can’t even answer your question earlier about what kind of water he needs.”

“Is there a reason you keep calling it a ‘he’, or are you just guessing?”

“I mean, the ridges are a little flamboyant, and that tends to be more of a male fish thing, but really it’s just a coin flip. Without knowing the species its almost impossible to tell. Why?”

“Only curious.” Diana brushes a hand over the orb, then rubs with her sleeve to buff out a smudge Irving’s thumb had left. “Well. Either way, I suppose. You do indoor aquariums as well as koi ponds?”

“Not so much anymore,” Irving hedges. “But I got a guy who can help out, and I’m willing to make an exception for you, Lady Scott.”

Diana makes her expression mildly grateful. “Excellent. I was planning on staying in the East Wing during the spring regardless, so I’ll call my people and we’ll work on installing something in my bedroom there. I’ll leave the size and shape to your expert opinion, but I think something that spans the wall might be pleasant. Don’t you agree?”

It’s a calculated move. Diana isn’t worried about the potential expense, but Irving will certainly be eager for the potential pay. Not that Diana expects Irving to actually _do_ anything greedy or desperate that could put the fish in danger, or separate him from Diana, but she knows it’s better to head that sort of thing off. Make Irving happy now, and she won’t have to worry about that position changing any time soon. Besides, Irving has known less than Diana was hoping, and she wants this meeting to still have some tangible benefit since the only solid answer she's received today is the confirmation that the fish is even more unknown than she anticipated.

“Oh, yeah absolutely I do,” Irving says, nodding, and Diana suppresses the urge to smile.

In the planning phases over the next week, Diana spends every moment that she doesn’t have her eyes on the babies with her eyes on the fish, watching with worry for the moment when he’ll start to look thinner, or for the water to start to look cloudy, or for his colors to dull, but the moment doesn’t come.

The babies sleep often, in a stop-start sort of way, which according to her speedy but thorough research is normal for human babies and hopefully within bounds for her children. This fish doesn’t, though, and he seems anxious whenever Syx isn’t awake. Sometimes Syx falls asleep with his arms clutched around the orb, and then the creature stares for a while, watchdog-fierce, before he seems to get restless. He never tries to roll himself out of Syx’s arms, though, no matter how uncomfortable or bored he looks.

She takes to pulling the fish out of the crib once Syx is deep enough in sleep that it won’t disturb him, and he only glares at her the first two times. Mostly he just rolls around her desk and bumps into new, different objects in turn, examining her crystal paperweight, her engraved pen, her old typewriter, her computer, before eventually he takes to rolling over to the left of her, to watch whatever work she’s doing, or just watch her in earnest.

At first she finds it unsettling, those big eyes above those menacing teeth trained right on her, but that doesn’t last long. She pretends she’s not watching him as intently as he’s watching her, but whenever her attention isn’t fully needed for a task she finds herself eyeing him in her periphery. He’s attentive while her fingers flow across the keyboard (she’s still corresponding closely with her lawyer, three emails a day at least while he tightens the safety net around them), he peers up at her curiously when she sighs to herself about a new policy Victor’s company is rolling out, and when, after a few hours where the babies have been blissfully asleep and Diana has been working steadily with the fish at her elbow for near an hour, she reaches her hand out to pick up a pen-

The fish pushes his ball against the pen holder, nudging it closer to her grip.

She pauses with her hand in the air. Certainly smarter than a goldfish, Diana thinks again. Out loud, driven by a deeply ingrained politeness, she says, “Oh, thank you,” and with no visible hint of hesitation, she takes a pen.

The fish twirls in a tight backflip in his ball, and Diana pretends that she’s not smiling as she gets back to work.


	4. Surface Tension

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two late night conversations.

To her surprise, Diana finds Victor in her bedroom at night after he’s done at work.

(She _used_ to think of it as her bedroom. Lately, if she’s being honest, she thinks of it near exclusively as the nursery. The nursery in which she happens to sleep.)

Victor is standing near the cribs, an expression on his face like old gears trying to turn.

“Victor,” she says, and he jolts. “May I ask what you’re doing in here?”

His expression goes sheepish when he turns to her. “Diana.” He rubs a hand on the back of his neck in a gesture that should look embarrassed and earnest, but she knows it’s a cultivated motion. She narrows her eyes.

“We have an agreement about our rooms, Victor,” she reminds him, tone more gentle than she’s actually feeling.

He half turns, back towards the cribs. “I haven’t even seen them yet. That’s all.”

 _You_ _’ve had plenty of opportunities, including Christmas morning,_ she doesn’t say, though she can tell he understands the shape of her thoughts from the uncomfortable twist of his mouth. She comes closer. Wayne is deeply under, but Syx is stirring, wriggling in his onesie and yawning against his tiny, pudgy hand. She suppresses a smile and lifts him up to cradle against her collarbone, where he makes a small cooing noise (not quite normal, not quite human) and settles again. She eyes Victor down over Syx’s head, steady, and his eyes flick to her, to the baby, and then away. “Well, now you’ve seen them.”

“You-” he stops, and swallows, and she realizes that this isn’t _entirely_ a smokescreen. “You decided to- He’s named for my father.”

Diana can feel Syx breathing, quiet and trusting against her. “He was a decent man,” she says evenly. From her it’s honest praise, and Victor knows that. “Is that all?”

 _Is he the only reason you_ _’re here?_ She doesn’t ask, but the question hangs in the air regardless.

“We never talked about children,” he says with a very slight smile.

“Even I am not capable of planning for everything, Victor.”

“I’ve always known you to be frustrated by surprises,” he says, not inaccurately. “You can forgive my confusion, I hope, that you’re taking to this one so well.”

She doesn’t respond to that. “Wayne will sleep though anything,” she says, pretending not to take a pinch of pleasure from the way he blanches at the name, “but Syx sleeps more lightly. If you’d like to pursue a real conversation about this, we should take it somewhere else.”

He takes a step back. “No. It’s late.” Another step, and soon he’s in the doorway. “I apologize, I should have asked before I-”

“I don’t know if you intend to be an active figure in their lives, Victor,” she interrupts, “but if you do, you will understand two things.”

His lips purse, wary, but he doesn’t leave. Not yet.

“I will not allow you to give your attention to one of them and not the other,” and she knows which one she means, knows he does as well, because the entire time she’s been in this room now he’s only looked at Syx once. Briefly. With discomfort. “If you mean to be father to one, you must be to both.”

After a beat, his head dips into a nod. “And your second condition?”

“In any situation more serious than a paper cut, you will defer to my decisions in the children’s care. I will not negotiate this.”

He pauses again, face still. “Don’t I always defer to your wisdom, Diana?” he asks, voice light and cloying like fresh whipped meringue. Without waiting for an answer he slips out, closing the door behind him.

She stares at the scuffs his shoes left in the plush carpet for a long moment, trying to decide how successful that little discourse had actually been, and then she locks it behind him. When she glances down, she sees green eyes peering back up at her. Syx looks nervous, but she lets herself smile cheerfully and his own expression opens to match.

“Hello baby,” she says gently (the books suggest that speaking to babies will help development, even this early- it feels awkward and undignified, but there isn’t anyone else to hear her anyway). “Did you sleep well?”

He makes a vague cooing noise, fingers pulling at her blouse as he smiles up at her.

“Oh really, Syx?” she asks, turning back toward the crib and bouncing him just lightly. “Did you have a restful nap with your fish friend?”

Aforementioned fish friend is alseep in the crib, still in his little ball. His new tank won’t be finished for a week or so yet, though Diana is less worried about that now that she’s at least made progress with feeding. Irving had shipped over a veritable buffet of sample feeder fish earlier today, ones that she thought might be the most edible for him based on his size and her deep-sea suspicions, and a note wishing her luck on figuring out how to actually get the food to him. Diana had lined up the small clear containers on her desk and set Syx’s fish down in front of them, mentally crossing her fingers that the creature would give her something to work with.

He hadn’t disappointed, and after a minute or so of intensive staring, he had rolled to bump into the container of a medium sized yellow-gray fish, a primal sort of focus on his face. Diana, not expecting much, had opened the top of the feeder container, and when Syx’s fish had glanced up at her with an expression she could only contextualize as a what-do-you-expect- _me_ -to-do-with-this, she had scowled down and lifted him up.

“I’m doing my best,” she had said, simply, and then paused when she realized that the ball felt- different, on one side. She pursed her lips and rotated the orb to examine the oddness, and when she pressed her fingers into the clear material, it gave for just a moment before seeming to solidify again. Narrowing her eyes, she lowered the ball towards the feeder container again, and, not sure what else to try, she let the bottom of the ball touch the top of the water.

It took a few moments, but something did happen. It was like watching slowed-down footage of a raindrop hitting water, the surface tension seemed to loosen slightly, the barrier between the two liquids dissolving, or opening, and Syx’s fish darted down, devouring his meal almost too fast to follow, and then retreated back up to his ball.

Diana had experimented a bit, after that. The ball returned to its form fairly quickly when removed from the water, and it softened when exposed to containers of both salt and fresh water, though it seemed to do so more slowly with the salt water. Diana supposed that there was some sort of filtering at work in the membrane of the ball, which would suggest that fresh water was closer to what the ball contained natively. She made a note of that, and of the feeder fish that Syx’s companion seemed most enthusiastic about eating, for a future message to Irving. It was a start, and at least now she didn’t have to worry about her third new responsibility starving slowly to death.

(She had been resolutely _not_ worrying about that particular possibility since Christmas. It was a relief to not have to keep up that mental wall anymore.)

Now, the happily fed fish is sleeping off his meal, and Diana and Syx are still awake despite the late hour.

Five hours of sleep tonight should be sufficient, she thinks, walking a circuit around the room as she keeps up a warm, chattering monologue above Syx’s head. She’s hoping to lull him back down, but after a minute or two she realizes that he seems to be paying more and more attention to her as she speaks, his face forming into an attentive sort of frown, eyes on her lips as they move.

“Perhaps I should stop talking,” she says, tone wry. “I feel as though I’m keeping you awake. Though, sleepy little thing, you’ve been napping on and off all day already, haven’t you? Little baby lazy.” He giggles when she raises an eyebrow at him, and then again when she bounces him a bit higher in her arms. She sighs, and then begins to hum a lullaby instead, an old Irish song her mother had favored when she was little. Syx’s mouth hangs open, then forms into a tiny smile, and not soon after that he is yawning, and then quickly asleep. She sighs again in relief, and then without thinking about it she leans down and kisses Syx lightly on the forhead.

She blames that on the lack of sleep. Then she bites her lip and thinks, _affection is allowed, Diana. You must learn to be comfortable with it if you want to be a good mother to them_.

It will take time. She tucks her new son back into his crib, checks to make sure Wayne is still asleep, and then gracefully collapses into her own bed. Four and a half hours of sleep, then. She’ll survive.


End file.
